Burningwood and Devilsbane

An executioner and a healer are an unlikely alliance in a world newly waking to restored ancient magic, but their leadership in freeing enslaved children from magic-repressing mines in the land of Allforth is as inspiring as it is dangerous. Blackthorn’s executioner’s past comes back to haunt him as he is abducted by three Amethyne witches from the last of the three Allforth courts. Roseleigh the healer, still reeling from the passionate night with her executioner suitor, is startled when her new friend Will, a dream-world visitor to their realm, explains he was eyewitness to Blackthorn’s abduction. A playwright, Will knows that while these three ‘weird sisters’ will inspire his upcoming drama, he needs to help his new friends and volunteers his spectral presence as an emissary, to seek out Blackthorn’s whereabouts. Roseleigh and a party of colleagues set out to track Blackthorn down and along the way, the two are dreamstitched and psychically continue their passionate exchanges.Blackthorn learns he’s being held captive by the Amethyne Court’s powerful but traumatized sorceress, who has been prophesied to rule over not just her own court, but all of Allforth as rot and decay spreads from years of unholy necromancy powering the mines full of imprisoned children alongside the working dead. She needs Blackthorn’s death-dealing spell to finally eliminate the royal family she’s been prohibited from harming by magical restraint. Blackthorn is well-aware that if he unleashes his death-magic in a land full of precarious countermeasures, the entire realm could be obliterated.At the center of the moldering Amethyne citadel stands a tree, the last vestige of the ancient magics of the land. Blackthorn begins to concoct a plan utilizing some of Roseleigh’s healing light, magic transferred to him in their unfolding love affair. Roseleigh and her coterie draw near, advised on their path by Will the dreamer, pausing to help heal plague victims that have been sent to slow Roseleigh down and perhaps consume her light and energy with their own need.An immense confrontation in the Amethyne citadel sees both Roseleigh and Blackthorn willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the land, knowing they’ve both been unwitting pawns in royal evils, but the great and ancient tree provides a way forward and offers the last of the elder faerie magics of the land to live anew in the duality of death and life; making Roseleigh and Blackthorn the faerie royals Will had prophesied. With a return to Blackthorn’s Silvervale court, they gently but firmly depose the sitting king and offer a new, egalitarian way forward to a more just world where magic should never have been taken from them in the first place.